Published in

MDPI, Forests, 5(13), p. 809, 2022

DOI: 10.3390/f13050809

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Heritable and Climatic Sources of Variation in Juvenile Tree Growth in an Austrian Common Garden Experiment of Central European Norway Spruce Populations

Journal article published in 2022 by Laura Morales ORCID, Kelly Swarts ORCID
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Postprint: archiving allowed
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We leveraged publicly available data on juvenile tree height of 299 Central European Norway spruce populations grown in a common garden experiment across 24 diverse trial locations in Austria and weather data from the trial locations and population provenances to parse the heritable and climatic components of juvenile tree height variation. Principal component analysis of geospatial and weather variables demonstrated high interannual variation among trial environments, largely driven by differences in precipitation, and separation of population provenances based on altitude, temperature, and snowfall. Tree height was highly heritable and modeling the covariance between populations and trial environments based on climatic data led to more stable estimation of heritability and population × environment variance. Climatic similarity among population provenances was highly predictive of population × environment estimates for tree height.